Dear Kadu by Pam Zinneman-Hope

This is the opening of a piece that travels though an entire, precarious pregnancy.

A continuous sequence of untitled poems with

snatches of scientific prose

The edge of the incoming wave

runs towards the edge

of the one ahead

overtakes its white frills

draws them back into itself

in a slow indrawn breath

like an act of love

repeated and repeated

*

Every week now I hear

your story down the phone,

living in your father’s voice

–  the dread of losing you.

Every week they go to the clinic

hopeful, your father and mother.

They’ve given you a name in utero.

With a name I can begin to imagine you.

 *

I’m wandering through the bedroom past the long, low window

and glance beyond your Grandad’s studio to the field:

I catch a reddish coloured fallow deer,

long ears up, chomping in the gold of uncut grass.

Between her and me light paints deep red globes

– rugosa hips – in the garden hedge,

it creates dark green shadows on leaves;

the deer creeps forward. Stands still:

What’s that scent? Is anything stirring?

And then she’s gone.

I don’t know what moves a deer

into her secret habits, along her hidden paths,

while the morning is adjusting its countless shadows

and your Grandad is composing, shifting musical phrases

up and down, down and up,

slow and fast, fast and slow.

 *

Today I heard how they’ve been told

things can happen very fast –

your outlook isn’t good –

living in your father’s voice –

the dread of damage to you.

*

Unborn babies:

If the disease causes severe anaemia it can lead to:

foetal heart failure

fluid retention and swelling

still birth

*

They went to the clinic, hopeful,

like the butterfly perched

by me on the sofa arm,

basking in electric light,

a small tortoiseshell. It moves

its frilly orange wings

borders scribbled blue and black

– like breathing.

Yesterday it flew in the window

in a cold beginning to autumn.

The butterfly’s wings are

open now and still. Now,

they move again.

*

You’ve been a single cell,

that divides repeatedly

until it becomes a blastocyst.

You’ve had tiny paddles

in place of hands

you’ve been fishlike, with gills.

Your watery sac in the womb

must seem like a forever sea

–  till you’re born into air.

*

Last week – inside your mother –

you came to visit,

you, her bump, her bun in the oven.

You came with your father

and your older brother,

toy postosuchus owner.

*

Rhesus disease causes:

the rhesus negative mother has previously been exposed to RhD positive blood

and has developed an immune response to it. Her antibodies destroy her baby’s blood cells.

*

At the beach we hunt

among Jurassic clays and shales

scanning and sifting the Charmouth shingle,

searching the shoreline.

At home your mother

cleans mud from our fossils

with a toothbrush in soapsuds

–  whorls and grooves of ammonites,

dark surface of belemnite rostrums –

till they glisten in sunshine.

All fleshy then inside their shells,

Swimming in warm lagoons,

in an alien geography

201 to 66 million years ago,

in a sudden global catastrophe

they were turned to stone.

Never mind those millions

I can hardly measure the time

that stretches from my birth

to you.

***

Pam Zinnemann-Hope’s first collection, On Cigarette Papers, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize & adapted by her as an Afternoon Play on Radio 4. Foothold, her second collection, travels through the seasons and ecology in Thomas Hardy territory, through deep time, music, love in old age. She is also a children’s author.

Photograph at the head of this poem is by the author.